Moral science has two halves. There are the implications of thinking straight about fact and value (ideal theory) and there are the implications of not thinking straight. Ideal theory is the foundation, error theory the daily battle.

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Daily American ad #2: the fraudulent investigation of the Flight 93 memorial

The Memorial Project gave only five days public notice for this Saturday's public meeting in Somerset. Tom Burnett and I are trying to crash their party, calling on the population of Somerset to come out and protest the terrorist memorializing design.

Our first ad is Tom's call to action. (PDF version of actual ad copy here. HTML version, with links to documentation, here.)

The second ad (HTML version below) exposes the Park Service whitewash of the crescent design. (PDFhere.)

Lizards who want to give this expose a bump on the LGF link-rating utility, you can do so here.

To the people of Somerset: Come out this Saturday and help tackle the hijacker!

Two days after the Crescent of Embrace was unveiled in September 2005, severalbloggersdiscovered that a person facing into the giant crescent would be facing almost exactly at Mecca. That makes the crescent a mihrab: the central feature around which every mosque is built.

The simplest mihrab--and the one you might be familiar with--is an Islamic prayer rug, which Muslims lay out facing Mecca for prayer. The Crescent of Embrace is, in effect, a gigantic Muslim prayer rug.

The Mecca orientation of the giant crescent is trivially easy to verify. Just use the Mecca-direction calculator at Islam.com to generate a graphic of the great circle direction from Somerset to Mecca. Muslims define their direction for prayer (called the “qibla”), as the great circle direction to Mecca (also called the “shortest distance direction,” or the “straight line direction”).

Here is a graphic of the qibla for Somerset, superimposed on the crescent site plan. The bisector of the crescent (red arrow) points almost exactly to Mecca:

All the redesign did was add some trees to the rear of a person facing into the giant crescent. That is like planting some trees behind a mosque. It doesn’t matter how many trees you plant around a mosque. It is still a mosque.

The Mecca orientation of the giant crescent should have long ago been headline news across the nation, and it would have been, if not for the extraordinary measures taken by the Memorial Project and the Park Service to cover up this explosive information. Project Superintendent Joanne Hanley denies the Mecca orientation of the crescent in public: “The only thing that orients the memorial is the crash site," she told the Post Gazette (August 18, 2007). Yet in private, she acknowledges the Mecca orientation of the crescent, and makes excuses for it.

“It has to be exact,” Hanley told me in an April 2006 conference call, explaining why she was not concerned about the almost-exact Mecca orientation of the crescent: “That’s one we talked about: it has to be exact.” (The crescent points 1.8° north of Mecca, ±0.1°.)

Patrick White, Vice President of Families of Flight 93, makes similar excuses, telling a colleague of mine last July that the almost exact Mecca orientation of the crescent cannot be intended as a tribute to Islam because the inexactness of it would be “disrespectful to Islam.”

That isn’t what he was telling the public. White told the press that my claims are untrue and “preposterous”: “We went through in detail all his original claims and came away with nothing.” (Tribune Democrat, July 15, 2007.) Nothing that is, but a bunch of bogus excuses for explosive information that they know to be factually accurate.

To make this willful blindness official, the Park Service found a trio of fraudulent academics to make blatantly dishonest excuses for the Mecca oriented crescent. One has been telling every reporter he can find that there is no such thing as the direction to Mecca:

Daniel Griffith, a geospatial information sciences professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, said anything can point toward Mecca, because the earth is round.(Post Gazette, August 18, 2007.)

This is not a misquote. Griffith said essentially the same thing to Tribune Democrat reporter Kirk Swuager, claiming that: “You can face anywhere to face Mecca.” One billion Muslims most certainly disagree.

The other two academics admit the giant Mecca oriented crescent and make the most ridiculous excuses for it. Kevin Jaques, a professor of Islamic sharia law at Indiana University, notes the similarity between the Mecca oriented crescent and a traditional mihrab, but assures the Park Service that there is no need for concern, because no one has ever seen a mihrab this BIG before:

Thirdly, most mihrabs are small, rarely larger than the figure of a man, although some of the more ornamental ones can be larger, but nothing as large at the crescent found in the site design. It is unlikely that most Muslims would walk into the area of the circle/crescent and see a mihrab because it is well beyond their limit of experience. Again, just because it is similar does not make it the same.

The other academic fraud is a Syrian professor of Islamic architecture named Nasser Rabbat who tells the Park Service not to worry about the almost exact Mecca orientation of the giant crescent because it cannot serve as a proper mihrab unless it points exactly to Mecca:

That is a bald lie. Many traditional mihrabs are off in their Mecca-orientation by 10, 20 or 30 degrees. The most famous mihrab in the world, the mihrab at the Great Mosque in Cordoba Spain, is oriented more than 45° off Mecca.

None of these “experts” even pretend to be objective. They only list excuses not to be concerned, and do not even make a show of considering possible Islamic intent. So who are these guys? Rabbat is described as an independent scholar, but in fact is an old classmate of Paul Murdoch, both having received masters degrees in architecture from UCLA in 1984. This raises the possibility that Paul Murdoch himself was able to orchestrate the investigation into warnings about his own design.

Kevin Jaques is also a highly suspicious character, having written an article shortly after 9/11 where he insists that the American response to 9/11 should be formulated in accordance with Islamic sharia law. Not only that, but he whitewashes sharia law by pretending that it is spurned by Islamic terrorists. Nowhere does he acknowledge that the terrorists' goal is impose sharia law on the entire world.

Jaques does not admit his religious affiliation, but it seems obvious that he must be a convert to Islam. Who else would call for a sharia law response to 9/11? He would also seem to be on the side of the radical supremacists, describing “Islamic revivalism” (the general heading for Bin Ladnism, Khomeini-ism, and other aggressively supremacist strains of Islam) as “new and exciting.”

Thus it seems that the Park Service let two blatantly dishonest Muslims whitewash warnings of a radical Islamic plot. Not that the Park Service was duped. They were just as dishonest themselves, claimingthat it isn’t possible to check the orientation of the crescent because: “none of the data or imagery used to develop the site plan has been geo-referenced.”

On the contrary, you can see to the left that the site plan is drawn on a topographical map. This topo map was provided by the Memorial Project itself to all of the design contestants. A topo map is the epitome of a geo-referenced map. North on a topo map is true north, which is all that is needed to calculate the orientation of the crescent.

They don’t even bother to notice that their so-called experts are contradicting each other. Griffith says you can face anywhere to face Mecca and Rabbat says that orientation on Mecca must be exact. The Park Service gladly embraces whatever mutually exclusive dishonesties are available. Any excuse to turn a blind eye to the undeniable Islamic and terrorist memorializing features of their chosen design.

The full significance of Murdoch’s plot takes a whole book to explain. (Given the importance of getting this information out to the public now, a provisional draft of my Crescent of Betrayal book is temporarily available for free download at CrescentOfBetrayal.com. Updates are being posted on my Error Theory blog.)

Very briefly, there are a dozen typical mosque features. All are realized in Paul Murdoch’s design, all on the same epic scale as his half-mile wide mihrab. The planned memorial is a terrorist memorial mosque, and this hijacking is still on track to succeed.

The Memorial Project’s public meeting begins at 10 tomorrow at the Somerset Courthouse. There is usually an intermission at noon, so if you arrive by 12 you should be able to sign up to comment.

On a macro scale, their are no perpendicularly crossed lines anywhere in the entire design. On a micro scale, I presume there will be some "crosses" in sidewalk cracks, etcetera.

According to Tom Burnett, the Memorial Project considered whether to allow family members to include religious symbols along with their loved one's names. (The Burnetts wanted to inscribe a cross next to Tom Jr.'s name.) The decision was "no." Including religious symbols was deemed too potentially divisive!

This was during the jury process, when everyone had been discussing the fact that the crescent is a traditional Islamic symbol. The design professionals considered it bigotry to object to the use of what was acknowledged to be an Islamic symbol shape, when they had no reason to believe that the use of this shape was intended by the architect to have Islamic meaning.

You realize, don't you, that you are playing the same game, embracing mutually exclusive justifications for your outrage.

You agree that the site *almost* points to Mecca and point out that the Great Mosque in Cordoba is off by 45 degrees.

The memorial is off by 1.8 degrees. Presumably you'd be arguing that it was a mihrab even if it was off by 45 degrees. In other words there is no orientation of the site that would be acceptable to you.

Architect Paul Murdoch certainly could have executed his plan without orienting nearly as closely on Mecca as he did. I think the reason he went with such a close orientation on Mecca is because the design also includes an exact Mecca orientation. The 44th glass block on the flight path defines a thematic or "true" upper crescent tip, where the flight path symbolically "breaks the circle" and turns it into a giant crescent. Connect the bottom crescent tip to this "true" upper crescent tip and the giant crescent points exactly to Mecca.

For the design to manifest two different orientations, an inexact overt orientation and an exact hidden orientation, the two have to be fairly close together. A large shift and the superposition of the two would cease to look like the traditional Islamic crescent, which covers about 2/3rds of a circle of arc.

Some elements would also become very oddly shaped. For instance, doubling the inexactness to a still-small 3.6° off Mecca would double the length of the Entry Portal Walkway (where the 44th block is placed). This walkway already projects 150 out into the giant crescent (a long way to go just to read the inscription on the block). If Murdoch was off by an amount that even began to be substantial by Islamic standards, like 15°, this projection would be a quarter mile long, and the block at the end would cease to logically mark the breaking of the circle. Murdoch's design would become ungainly and misshapen, and Murdoch is an artist. He doesn't like ungainly.

Those are the constraints imposed by Murdoch's design concept. In the abstract, what determines whether the crescent is a mihrab is not the precision of its orientation, but whether or not the crescent is INTENDED to serve as a mihrab. (This from Johnstown imam Fouad El Bayly.)

The way Murdoch proves intent is by elaborate repetitions of both the inexact and the exact Mecca orientations of the giant crescent. If Murdoch had gone through these same proofs of intent with an inexact orientation of the crescent that was further off of Mecca, it would still constitute proof of intent in the same sense and would indeed still make the memorial a mosque.

But that is not what Murdoch did. The inexact orientation of his crescent is only a little bit off, which fits a pattern he uses throughout his design. The Memorial Plaza, for instance, is centered just a little bit below the exact position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag, then hidden inside the upper portion of the Plaza is a separate section of Memorial Wall, inscribed with the 9/11 date, that sits EXACTLY in the position of the star on an Islamic flag. Murdoch repeats everything, including his pattern of exact Islamic geometries hidden inside of only slightly inexact Islamic geometries.

Of course that is too much nuance for the left-wing mind. Part of Murdoch's genius was to understand this, even in the planning stage. He knew ahead of time that that he would be able to manipulate these people's relentless determination NOT to understand. A true evil genius.

I don't know why our government needs to be involved in the memorial at all. The family members and their advocates should easily be able to raise the funds for a private memorial that would not have to pass some politically correct bureaucratic vetting. Besides, is this field not on private property? Or did the government use some arcane legislation to confiscate it?Even to a very casual observer, this design looks like an Islamic crescent. It should be rejected out of hand, totally and completely. The so-called artist should be sent away with a "thanks, but no thanks" and let's start from scratch.

About Me

Here is a short bio I sent to press people covering the Flight 93 memorial debacle. My training is as an economist. I was in the PhD program in economics at Stanford until my research led me more towards moral theory and constitutional law, at which point I dropped the program and started working on my own. I was writing a book on republicanism (the system of liberty under law) for World Ahead Publishing when I discovered that the Flight 93 memorial was going to be a terrorist memorial mosque. World Ahead agreed to first publish my book about this rehijacking of Flight 93 (Crescent of Betrayal, temporarily available for free download at CrescentOfBetrayal.com). This is not my first venture into journalism. Over the years I have been a writer, opinions editor, and advisor for Stanford’s conservative campus newspaper The Stanford Review, and am currently on the Review’s board of directors.